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The Shield Wiki:Manual of Style
The Shield Wiki's Manual of Style are the guidelines designed to establish a standard style and format for all the articles within the wiki. To ensure consistency amongst all the articles, editors should subject to the following guidelines. In addition, this Manual seeks to accomplish articles that are understandable, organized, consistent, attractive, and easy to read. Article titles There are some general rules regarding how articles on The Shield Wiki should be titled. * The titles of articles about characters should be the name by which the character was most commonly known within the show, with later names preferred to earlier ones, and full names preferred to partial names or nicknames. Titles such as "Captain", "Chief", "Officer", "Doctor" or "Mister" should be omitted. * Abbreviations such as "DoJ", "ICE", and "FBI" should not be used. Rather, they should be written out in full (Department of Justice, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Federal Bureau of Investigation) with a redirect page created for the abbreviation (see "Redirects" below). * Disambiguation tags may also be necessary in the title. See below for more information. Disambiguation Disambiguation is the process of resolving ambiguity within articles with identical or similar titles. Disambiguation may serve to distinguish articles that would otherwise have the same title, or to differentiate articles with similar titles. Essentially, disambiguations are paths leading to different topics that share the same term or a similar term. There are three ways to disambiguate on The Shield Wiki: Disambiguation tags Disambiguation tags are used for articles (people or things) which share the same title. These tags appear in the title in parentheses, eg. (gang member), (officer), (director), etc. The tags used must be consistent within articles with the same problem. In the case of characters with the same name, tags should indicate the significant trait for which that character was known, for example his "profession" (detective, officer, drug dealer, etc.) If the profession of the character is not know or not clear, then the next significant trait should be used (boyfriend, victim, murderer). These same rules should be applied to non-character articles as well, if possible. Disambiguation notes If two articles have similar titles, a disambiguation note should be used, in addition to tags. For example, if someone searched for the Season 2 episode titled "Coyote", they'd come across the page for the term "coyote." To help the reader find what they may be looking for, a note is included at the top of the page for "coyote": :You may be looking for the Season 2 episode titled "Coyote (episode)". A similar note is not necessary for the episode article, as it has the more specific title of the two. Disambiguation pages The most common form of disambiguation page on The Shield Wiki distinguishes between character names. In The Shield, sometimes first and last names of characters are repeated, which can often be confusing. If two characters have an identical name, or more than two characters have similar names, a separate disambiguation page should be created. All disambiguation pages contain "(disambiguation)" in their title, have the template, and are categorized as such. Note that these rules apply exactly the same for last-name-only characters, as well as locations and items which share the same name. Article infobox All articles about characters, actors/actresses, crew, and others should include a corresponding "infobox". This box contains the most relevant and/or important facts about the article subject, with a picture. Infobox always appear in the upper-right-hand corner of the article. To maintain consistency, there are templates that are copied and pasted into new articles for the creation of infobox. See The Shield Wiki:Page templates for a list of full templates currently used. A shortcut to some common infoboxes, without other page template information, can be found at The Shield Wiki:Info boxes. Article introduction Every page should begin with an introduction, briefly summarizing the article for the reader. The introduction should give a quick explanation of what the article is about and establish its context. The length of the introduction can vary from a single sentence to multiple paragraphs. The title or subject of that article should appear in the first line in bold. Even though the article title is already listed, it's useful to emphasize the article's subject for the reader. Headlines, sections, and spacing To create a new section in an article, surround the headline text with two or more (equal signs) and include one space between each equal sign and the nearest letter. The wiki engine will automatically create a table of contents once there are four or more headers in an article. The first word and all proper nouns of the header should be capitalized, and all other words lowercase. For the purposes of keeping the wiki markup accessible to all users, include one blank line between a headline or sub-headline and the subsequent image or paragraph of text. Please avoid using links in headers. Depending on the browser's default settings, some users may not be able to see the links properly. It is much more useful to place the appropriate link in the first sentence after the header. To prevent an image at the end of one subsection from running into the header for the next section, type the following template directly above the next header: . This template adds just the right amount of space to keep everything above the header for all browsers. If there is enough text to separate the sections already, the tag will not add space. See also .